Keeper of the Clown Bell

As one who personally knows some of the principles engaged in the drama being played out in the Senate Judiciary Committee I must raise a serious objection to Sheldon Whitehouse's claim that he had never played "Quarters" in his life : WHITEHOUSE: Devil’s triangle? KAVANAUGH: Drinking game. WHITEHOUSE: How’s it played? KAVANAUGH: Three glasses in a triangle. WHITEHOUSE: And? KAVANAUGH: You ever played quarters? WHITEHOUSE: No (ph). Let me say this as loudly and clearly as I can - NOT CREDIBLE!!! Sheldon almost certainly played quarters and I'm CBF 100% positive I played Quarters with his younger brother myself (Sheldon is a few years older than I am so he was playing Quarters in 1976/77 while I was doing my doing my Quarters competition in 1979/80). Putting aside the Senator from Rhode Island's bald face lie it must be said that few in that body would be more adept at reading the coded messages contained in the Georgetown Prep yearbook from the ...

I grew up in a haunted house - It wasn't spooky like some Hollywood movie (well, maybe a little spooky) but the house was inhabited by a ghost. The original house had been a rustic farm house but a subsequent owner had made improvements and converted it into something resembling a mini French chateau complete with a turret, beveled glass windows in the french doors and a sandy stucco exterior. It was this man's spirit who occupied the house post mortem and his presence could be felt strongly in particular rooms of the house including the living room, downstairs guest room, an upstairs dressing room and my bedroom (especially my closet). At this point you're probably expecting me to start telling a bunch of ghost stories to prove my assertion but you'd be wrong - not that I don't have them because I do - I'm only telling one and I don't care if you believe me. Poltergeists exist in this material world and almost everyone knows it and has had their own persona...

The Kennedy seat - what should be known properly as “The Black Seat” is the most contentious chair on the SCOTUS. It was held by Hugo Black - a staunch FDR New Dealer from the Solid South and it has been THE swing seat from 1937 to the present. Black was succeeded by infamous squish Lewis Powell and when Reagan tried to right the ship in his second term all hell broke loose - first Bork and then Ginsberg (not RGB but Douglas) who was denied the chair because, get this, he had puffed marijuana a few times in his youth which eventually landed Justice Kennedy in the spot which Bork or Ginsberg should have taken. Bork would have been a highly entertaining Supreme Court Justice and it’s really a shame that he didn’t get put on the bench but the court is highly political and the Deep State pulled out all the stops to prevent his ascendancy. Ginsberg was a different story - it came down to religion and the fact that there is a glass ceiling on Jewish justices and the left wasn’t going to ...

When it comes to pop songs that define the Obama era the exemplum optimi absoluta is B.o.B.'s soulful reflection on hip hop ascendancy titled " Airplanes " featuring vocals from Hayley Williams which describes the ennui of reaching the top and having nowhere else to go. When I listen to it I can imagine Barack singing the lines "There comes a time when you fade to the blackness/And when you're staring at the phone in your lap/And you hoping but them people never call you back" or "And when your plans unravel in the sand/What would you wish for, if you had one chance?" then Michelle leaning in to belt out the chorus: "Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shootin' stars/I could really use a wish right now, wish right now, wish right now" "Yeah yeah somebody take me back to the days/Before this was a job before I got paid" because community organizing was actually fun "But nowadays we rapping to sta...

Drink Her Up If you ever wondered what goes on inside the mind of a drug addict or alcoholic who can't seem to get the monkey off their back - in fact, don't even try to get the money off their backs but instead just become the monkey -  then take a few minutes and read the poems of Heinrich Karl Bukowski (AKA Charles Bukowski) who put his thoughts to paper over an extraordinarily long "career" of debauchery while flim-flamming the literary world. Come to think of it you don't even have to read the poems but just soak in the titles of his poetry collections and you'll have a pretty good idea where he's coming from - "Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 story Window", "Mockingbird Wish Me Luck", "Maybe Tomorrow", "Love Is a Dog from Hell" and "War All the Time" to cite just a few examples present a fogged window into the twisted (tortured) mind of a man consumed by passions resulting from the impr...

There is an intractable and (seemingly) insurmountable struggle found in human existence resulting from the fact that We the People are spiritual beings (souls) trapped in material bodies (dust to dust). I'm not talking about religion here, though this reality is the wellspring of all religion, but rather about a fundamental aspect of humanities day to day existence that supersedes religious conviction and confounds scientific inquiry. What are we? Nothing forces the question more than mortality because when the living look down on the lifeless carcass lying in a box and examine the material body looking exactly like the person we knew when last we saw him "alive" it's absolutely clear that the person is gone. Where did they go? The thing that had animated the body, given it voice and movement, connected it to family, friends and community, compelled breath and blood and urine to flow is gone - the divine spark of life that is what we truly are has been extinguishe...